Before Ragtime, his next book, put him in the pantheon of contemporary American writers. A time before The Book of Daniel, his electrifying novel based on the real-life electrocution of the Rosenbergs, the accused “atom bomb spies,” made Doctorow known more for his fiction than for his editor’s pen. It was at a time, in the mid-’60s, when Doctorow was still a novice novelist, yet already a highly respected editor.
He helped immortalize those of the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight when they were only available as flimsy, hard-to-find ’40s collectibles.
The key word here is “born.” Doctorow likes origin stories. We had been talking about his favorite childhood reading, which ranged from the “Horatio Hornblower” naval adventure series, to Tolstoy, and the nearly forgotten Rafael Sabatini, author of the cape and sword historical potboilers Captain Blood and Scaramouche, the latter a favorite of my father’s as well for its still brill opening line: “He was born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad.” “You know I was there for the origin and birth of Superman and Batman?” he asks me.īy this he doesn’t mean he was there with Jor-El, Superman’s dad, as the planet Krypton was about to explode and the future Man of Steel was launched into interstellar space. On that day, the celebrated, cerebral novelist - known best for Ragtime, his breakthrough incorporation of recent American historical figures into literary fiction - disclosed that he was instrumental in the enshrinement of another kind of historical fiction. I didn’t know about it, until I sat down with him at is kitchen table in his Manhattan apartment last year, just after the publication of what would be his final novel, Andrew’s Brain. HERE’S SOMETHING you probably didn’t know about E.L.
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